She ages toward eighty. She vows to run a 5K within the months before that decadal transition, a quiet goal few doctors, friends or family members understand. Who makes sense of her new purple shoes with white swooshes that she scrubs to limit the creep of mud. Or how slow she can go. Before snowmelt, she accepts a sliding treadmill belt as necessary. Then the oval track as the season turns. Heat is a worry. She hears paces on the all-weather track that sneak up from behind. She may pass a slow walker but no one else. The crow flipping a gum wrapper waits until the last second to hop out of her way. Cottonwood seed begins to blow by day and the first firefly out by night.

sweat 

starts up slow 
after a half mile 

as the breeze aways her ponytail 
and her shadow appears to walk 
where the high school track bends west 

—Long-listed Finalist in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #4

Tricia Knoll

is a Contributing Editor of Verse-Virtual and a Vermont poet whose work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. She is the author of nine poetry books (seven full-length and two chapbooks). Her tenth is forthcoming in July 2027: Gathering Marbles (Fernwood Press), a full-length collection of poems about aging. Also released by Fernwood Press, her full-length Wild Apples (February 2024) details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. One Bent Twig (Future Cycle Press, 2023) is a full-length collection of eco-poetry highlighting trees Knoll has planted or loved, or now worries about due to climate chaos. Her full-length How I Learned to Be White (Antrim House 2018) received the 2018 Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry.

The Unknown Daughter (Finishing Line Press, March 2024)—part autobiography, part fiction and fantasy, part feminist history—was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. A poem from that chapbook, “Boundaries,” was a finalist in the 2025 Charles Simic Poetry Prize and appeared in Hole in the Head Review (Spring 2026).

After 18 years of writing free verse, Knoll now writes prose poetry. At the age of 78 she received a diagnosis of being at severe risk of fracture after 35 years taking an antidepressant that eroded her bones. For nine months she has been tapering off the drug and kicking up a running and weight-lifting discipline along with medication to rebuild bone. She is now running two miles several times a week.

Author’s website, with dozens of links to her works online including haiku and haibun: https://triciaknoll.com

Author at Bluesky: https://triciaknoll.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Worth Waiting For by Tricia Knoll in Silver Birch Press, My Favorite Things Series (3 April 2025)

⚡ My Brief Take on Eco-Poetry, an essay by Knoll in Verse-Virtual 11.3 (March 2024)

⚡ Kosmos Summer 2021 Gallery of Poets in Kosmos: journal for transformation; scroll past the works of three poets to find this pair by Knoll: “Tree Sentiency in Six Thousand Languages” and “Rock Speak”

⚡ November’s Featured Poet | Tricia Knoll in Kosmos (2018)